Please Stop Disrupting My Class and Read.....Please!

Core 3 has been one of the hardest semesters of my life; walking into the middle school in August, I had high hopes and expectations for myself. I would be the best student teacher ever, I would immediately have great classroom control and management, my planning would be spot-on and students would engage deeply with the books that I found riveting. *Hear my sarcasm and tears* My Core 3 goals took a hard hit. One of my pet ideas starting out as an inexperienced student teacher was that students who were ‘bad’ in the classroom where actually the students that couldn’t read (or struggled to read at least). However, like most underdeveloped ideas, I was bound to hit some road bumps. In my middle school classroom, I found that all my students could read and read well. They could comprehend at grade level – and above- with very little scaffolding, they had good fluency and word recognition rates, and very few learning disabilities. Yet, most them exhibited some very zoo-like behaviors. A solid amount of the zoo-like behaviors could be contributed to my shaky lesson planning and my lack of confidence in classroom management- but not all of them. The class did quite a bit to avoid the process of reading. As I reviewed my original research questions for the semester: What if all behavioral issues in the classroom can be solved by establishing better reading skills in the students that are exhibiting the issues? If good reading skills are established like classroom protocol is established every year and teachers make helping students find a favorite author or genre of books apart of their curriculum, will the students who quip ‘reading is stupid’ decrease through the year? What if not reading for enjoyment or reading and being miserable isn’t a personal trait that differs between individuals but is a lack sufficient skills and knowledge to become an independent reader? I found that I had discovered the very basic outline of my answer (these are questions that I could develop for years and never completely exhaust them) and that I had overlooked a very important student that would walk through the classroom: alliterate students. In Kylene Beers text, When Kids Can’t Read, she defines alliterate students as dormant readers, uncommitted readers, unmotivated readers, and unskilled readers (279). As I looked over the classroom that I call my own (even though its temporary) I decided to determine if my students were struggling with reading disabilities- in its many forms- or if they were just unmotivated, unskilled, or uncommitted readers. I took out any misbehavior that I contributed to my own developing classroom management and planning skills, other classroom factors such as time of day or school issues, and really looked at my students. I found that about half of them fell in the ‘love to read, carry a book around’ pool and the other half predominately fell into the ‘unmotivated and maybe unskilled’ pool. Unmotivated readers have a negative connotation towards reading and those who read; as Beers states, “They are our most difficult to reconnect reading because they don’t value the act or the people who enjoy reading” (279). I have found this to be extremely true- reading is an act with a negative value to them and even if they enjoy the story as it is read to them- these students DO NOT want to read on their own. In fact, I had a particular kid fall out of his chair and pretend to stab himself with his pencil to get out of individual reading. Is it bad that I had to struggle not to laugh at his dramatics? So, to compensate for these readers who avoid reading (I don’t think they’d read a stop sign if it wasn’t painted red) I have started reading the short stories we study in class out loud. Usually I had copies for the students to follow along with but enforcing that they were co-reading with me was hard. I’d stop at various points for discussion and scaffolding notes on graphic organizers so that students could engage with the text (discussion) and keep track of characters and events; however, I felt the frustration of the students who read well and loved to read- they were being held back. In my unit that will take place after Thanksgiving until Christmas break, I’ve tried to bridge the gap between whole-class reading and individual reading. In both cases engagement and accountability is a main concern for me, which I’m going to try guaranteeing through a timeline project on the individual reading and notes on the whole-class reading. My plans are still developing; however, I’m working in different literacy strategies that were introduced in the text 50 Instructional Routines to Develop Content Literacy by Douglas Fisher, William Brozo, Nancy Frey, and Gay Ivey. One of Beers main points about unmotivated readers was that they had to be drawn into the text and the book absolutely had to hold their interest. So, my attempts to create interest and then hold interest include using strategies like anticipation guides, graphic organizers to take notes so that content is displayed visually instead of in a linear fashion, reading responses that promote individual opinions, essential questions that are very controversial (for 7th graders), and most importantly, a creative writing assignment that makes them apart of the story. I’m building literacy strategies deep into the everyday classroom work- to scaffold for struggling readers and hold the students accountable for their reading- and to help with my classroom management (Research question 1&2). I am hoping that my improved classroom management, the various literacy strategies, and individualized nature of the assignments I’m building will reach out to unmotivated readers and pull them in. This extended research on my own planning and execution will *hopefully* make for a much smoother Core 4 in both planning and classroom management. Since I do have more freedom with the books I can chose, I am going to use more YAL instead of short stories to strive for 100% engagement from all students. And I’m going to continue to develop my answers to my research questions, this time with more information to work with. Literacy strategies, no matter how small, hold a dual purpose of accountability and building independent reading skills; this is very important to building classroom protocol towards reading and general behavior. As I dive into Core 4, I’ll have more opportunities to connect with students individually and put books in their hands until we find one that they can’t stop reading. Until next time- The overly optimistic and quite unrealistic student teacher. Sources: Beers, Kylene. When Kids Can’t Read: What Teachers Can Do. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003. Fisher, D., Brozo, W., Frey, N., Ivey, G., 50 Instructional Routines to Develop Content Literacy. Boston: Pearson, 2015.